


After The Darkness

by allthebeautifulthings9828



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angelic Grace, Castiel Loves Dean, Dean Loves Castiel, Domestic, Domestic Dean Winchester, Domestic Fluff, Family, Family Feels, Family Fluff, Feels, Fluff, Gen, Good Parent Castiel, Good Parent Dean, Love, M/M, Magic, Magical Pregnancy, Nephilim, POV Dean Winchester, Parent Castiel, Parent Dean, Parent-Child Relationship, Pregnant Castiel, Righteous Man, Saving the World, The Darkness - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-23
Updated: 2015-05-23
Packaged: 2018-03-31 19:53:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,943
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3990643
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/allthebeautifulthings9828/pseuds/allthebeautifulthings9828
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Seven years after Sam and Dean unleashed The Darkness on the world, things look very different. Survivors try to rebuild society based in agriculture without cities for industry anymore. Life for the Winchesters is quite different as well. While Dean and Castiel fight The Darkness together, they commit their lives and have a child--a daughter who was prophesied to save the world.</p>
            </blockquote>





	After The Darkness

Hands braced on the bathroom counter, Dean watched the computer screen with eyes squinted in deep concentration. Left, gather, right, gather. Don't let it slip. Left, gather, right, gather. He rubbed the scruff framing his bottom lip and pondered what could happen if he missed a step somewhere.

Imaginative blue eyes leaned into his line of vision and made a study of him as well. Sweet pink lips twisted into an amused little smile.

"Are you laughing at me?" Dean asked, grinning back.

A giggle behind hands answered him, and then, "Daddy can do it."

"Daddy can do a lot of things." Bending lower, Dean kissed the tip of his daughter's nose, which brought out another giggle. "Okay, princess. Spin around here. We're gonna be late." He hooked his meaty hands under her delicate arms and turned her on the counter to face the mirror.

"I'm no princess. I'm a warrior queen," she replied with a haughty lift of her chin.

Dean laughed quietly as he thoroughly brushing through the ratty mess of hair prone to his five-year-old every morning. "Now you really sound like Daddy."

She beamed at the mirror. Nothing made her feel like such a big girl like being compared to her other father. With dark hair and bright eyes, she looked like Castiel too, but glimmers of Dean rippled in her mischievous smile and her eagerness to fight injustice. So many days he got called to her kindergarten class to listen to reports of her tackling bullies on the playground and administering Winchester justice. He'd never taught her those things but she certainly knew what to do.

"Ow!"

"Sorry."

She sighed. "When's Daddy coming home?"

"When the other angels finish locking up the Darkness again." Concentration kept Dean's responses short. His tongue poked out from one corner of his mouth as his fingers wound through long pieces of chocolate hair.

His daughter considered it. "How long you fighting it?"

"Uh ... let's see. Seven years, I think."

Though she sat crosslegged on the counter, she put her little fists on her hips. "I can fight too, y'know. I'm half-angel, aren't I?"

Dean chuckled again. "Yeah, you are. You'll get your chance to stand up for what's right one day. Right now, your job is to be our little girl and go to school and play with your friends and all that fun stuff. Daddy said when you turn eighteen, you can choose to fight alongside us."

"That's so long," she groaned dramatically.

"I know, I know. You'll thank me when you're bigger and you have fun memories of being a kid," he said, trying to keep it light while pushing away memories of his own disjointed childhood.

Bored with the conversation, Dean's little girl amused herself with pointing a finger at the toothbrush cup. Two larger toothbrushes and one small purple toothbrush trembled and then floated upward from the cup under the power of her grace directed through her finger. A smooth calm fell over her features, only broken by a smile that showed how pleased she was with herself for levitating objects. The three toothbrushes twirled and danced in the air as if a breeze tickled a set of chimes dangling from a porch. Her finger twirled and so did the toothbrushes, making her laugh.

"You know better, Miss Warrior Queen," whispered Dean playfully in her ear. He straightened again and searched the counter drawer for a hair tie. "I think I got it this time. Your old man's not so bad with French braids after a couple of YouTube videos. Daddy's the hair guru, I know. He'll be home in a few days." As he spoke, he looped the tie around the tail of her braid until he decided it was secure. "Feel okay?"

The little girl shook her head. Dean held his breath while she tested the braid to her high standards but it held and he exhaled. Sure, it went a little askewed and some pieces of hair poked out at odd angles but it wasn't bad.

Just like her angel father, she forgot frivolous concerns like her hair as soon as they were properly sorted. Her eyes turned up to Dean's reflection in the mirror, studying him with all the trust of an innocent little girl but all the celestial wisdom of an angel at the same time. He knew heavy questions were on the way. Her face inclined quizzically, exactly mirroring the way Castiel looked at him for over a decade.

"Talk to me," he said, leaning down on the counter on his elbows.

She pondered for a moment. "The Darkness is really old bad stuff."

"Really old," Dean confirmed, nodding.

"Before people and houses and angels and God and everything?"

"Yep." He nodded again.

Her face tilted to the other side. "How come you and Daddy had me if you gotta beat The Darkness? You said I can't fight yet but I'm half angel. I'm s'pposed to fight." It seemed she had trouble filtering her rather mature internal crisis through her five-year-old human brain. "How come I'm born?"

At first Dean didn't know how to answer such a complex question in terms that a five-year-old could grasp. His instinct spoke for him, nearly detached as if he listened from another place. "The Darkness eats everything it touches. It's just big black stuff hungry for goodness because it can't have goodness for itself. Before you were born, I went through a really bad time with your Uncle Sammy. We got stuck in our own darkness and we weren't heroes anymore."

"Dad, you are a hero." She laughed and rolled her eyes, not knowing who he was before and what the Mark of Cain did to him.

Dean smiled indulgently and avoided confessing what he'd done in the name of selfishness. He never had been able to tell his child that he and Sam were the ones who unleashed the Darkness on the world. It wasn't about him. The question was about why she existed in such a dangerous period of human history--why they brought her there.

"There were a lot more people before the Darkness came. There were cities full of people that you've never even heard of. It got pretty lonely for a while. The Darkness didn't get to all of us, though, and we started to rebuild. We figured out that it didn't come back to places it already ate. The destruction ripped up the ground everywhere too, and you know what? Something good happened. Food grew like crazy on the ripped up land, so the surviving families learned to be farmers. No more huge cities opened up all the space like it used to be before electricity and stuff." Dean shrugged lightly. "Well, for the first couple of years, we didn't have electricity again either."

"Is that why Uncle Sammy sweats outside with the animals all day? Daddy told me he used to be an important guy. A...." Her young mind turned, trying to draw out the lost detail.

"A Man of Letters," said Dean for her. "I'm one of those too and you're a Woman of Letters."

"No," she corrected, jerking her chin again, "I'm a Warrior Queen of Letters, Dad."

"Okay," Dean laughed. "Yeah, Uncle Sammy doesn't fight bad stuff with Daddy and me anymore. You're right. He's a good farmer, though, and he keeps yummy food in our bellies, doesn't he?"

She nodded. "Why did he stop fighting?"

"Well, he decided he had to stop because we were distracting each other. One of us had to stop fighting so we both could remember what it meant to be heroes and do good in the world." Dean wondered if he was explaining it well enough since it was such a deeply complex issue between brothers. "Sammy used to go to college and stuff. He wasn't supposed to be a hunter with me. I asked him to have a normal life since I think he's better at it than me and it's worked out great since then. Sammy's happy being a farmer."

"He likes my horse. Told me so." She beamed with pride again.

Dean grew rather serious for a moment and poked out his lower lip, considering the worth of her horse. "Yep, you got a pretty awesome one, I'd say."

"Then was Uncle Sammy a farmer before me?"

"A little while, yeah. Bought our land here, built the house, and every time Daddy and I came home on a break, it seemed like we had more animals and more food planted." Dean's thoughts drifted for a time. He remembered the juxtaposition of feeling helpless while fighting the chaos of the Darkness and then coming home to the land already destroyed and resurrected by the survivors. "I know it might be tough for you to understand but the Darkness only wants death and misery. It's hard to be in the middle of that without getting too ... sad." It was an overly simplistic word but he didn't want to scare his little girl.

"I'm sorry you were sad, Dad," she said sincerely.

The precious little life in his care softened his heart at least a dozen times a day but her concern for what amounted to his years of self-loathing, destruction, and depression positively melted him. Dean wrapped an arm around her and picked her up off the bathroom counter. He strolled the upstairs hall with his little girl nuzzled against his chest.

"Daddy and I aren't sad anymore because we had you," he said quietly. "The only way to fight the Darkness is with light. Like Daddy says, there is no light greater than love. Working so closely together let us ... ehh ... let's say it taught us how to love each other. Once I had him and he had me, life wasn't gonna be any fun without you. So we found a really, really old spell that let Daddy change his body to a woman version of himself long enough for us to make you. Here you are now--half Dean, half Castiel, and one awesome little girl. And you know what else?"

Eyes shining at being the star of the story, she shook her head.

"You are pure love. You're here because the love inside of you is strong enough to defeat all the Darkness for the world. You are the biggest, most awesome, scariest weapon we have against the Darkness, and you are the reason why Daddy's gone to lock it away in prison again."

Her eyes grew wide, utterly astonished and delighted. "Is that true? How did I defeat it?"

Then came the difficult part. Dean wasn't sure how to explain it in simple terms. Once Castiel, transformed by ancient magic into a female version of his vessel, became pregnant with Dean's child, he--well, she--discovered an obscure biblical prophecy about the Righteous Man's heir defeating darkness. It wasn't their intention but Dean remembered who he'd once been as Castiel's body blossomed with life. He was a hero. He was a man capable of saving the innocent in the world from destruction wherever the threat loomed.

"Your grace," he said, patting her heart, "has extra magic in it. You're the daughter of the Righteous Man and an Angel of the Lord. You're made of pure love. Just a tiny bit of your grace was enough to wrestle the Darkness into obeying Daddy and me. It's poison to everything evil. So you're a hero too. We wanted you in love and that love subdued the Darkness. It'll all be over soon."

She lifted her chin proudly and declared, "I told you I'm a warrior queen."


End file.
